Eleanor
W. Traylor
(202) 806-6730
Perhaps more
than any other place in the curriculum, the English
classroom asks us to enter the grandest theater of
all: the theater of our minds. And from that rich stage
of acquired knowledge and experience, it calls us to
produce meaning for ourselves and for a world which,
though full of meaning, is curiously absent of meaning
until each of us supplies it. Since language is the
vehicle of meaning, language itself becomes our subject
in the English classroom.
Language,
of course, (to paraphrase Terry Eagleton) is what distinguishes
human beings from our cousins in creativity -- squirrels
and pigs, for instance. They are warm-blooded animals
too. But if we could find a squirrel who could say, "I
know I am a squirrel, and I insist upon a better world
for squirrels," then we should immediately baptize
that squirrel and give him or her a scheduling or entrance
examination to a school for higher learning. If language
distinguishes us as human beings, then it is language
that makes possible our highest achievements and our
greatest catastrophes. The English classroom asks us
to choose which of these two approaches to language
we will choose throughout our lives.
At Howard,
the English classroom offers us models of persons who
entered the theater of their minds and from that place
produced meaning so profound that it forced language
to transform a world of catastrophe by changing its
terms.
The man for
whom Frederick Douglass Hall is named grew up in a
world where access to an English classroom was denied
him. He visited the theater of his mind -- a place
he frequented -- and discovered that this denial was
unnatural. He fashioned a language to convey that idea.
The rest is history.
Ernest Just,
for whom a building is named on this campus down in
the famous valley where scientists are born and raised,
grew up in a world where illnesses caused by cellular
irregularities were incurable. He looked into the theater
of his own mind -- a place he frequented -- and dicovered
a theory and a practice for cellular fission. All cancer
therapy begins there.
Alain Leroy
Locke, for whom the building where the English Department
is located is named, looked into the theater of his
mind -- a place he frequented -- and reflected that
his people, though despised through the laws and attitudes
of the land, were the very people who had produced
the language, the music, and the artistic forms that
most identify modern and contemporary humanity. He
noticed that this great achievement was not a matter
of formal study in the schools of this nation. That
study began here. It constitutes the greatness of this
place. The rest is history.
One of our
Mothers, Mary McCleod Bethune, reminded us that we
are the custodians of a great civilization. One of
her sons, James Baldwin, said amen but added that we
are also the producers of a civilization that should
become greater. His intellectual father, W.E.B. DuBois,
had suggested that we achieve personal and global greatness
through entering the theater of our minds to discover
broad sympathy, a knowledge of the world and our relation
to it.
Finally,
their ancestor and ours, Frederick Douglass had reminded
them and us that:
We have to
do with the past only as we can make it useful to the
present and to the future. To all inspiring motives,
to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we
are welcome. But now is the time, the important time.
Your fathers have lived, died, and you must do your
work.
